Today's software solutions require mostly multiple manual interactions to establish collaboration and communication sessions between users. These users need to actively go through a number of steps to share data, documents and applications with remote users. This lengthy manual process is a hindrance to effective and natural communication and collaboration.
For example, in most collaboration software solutions the communication partners need to be addressed individually when a session is established, e.g. by selecting their user names or by entering their email addresses. If at a later point in time a similar group wants to collaborate again, this process needs to be repeated.
Also, existing software solutions require a dedicated host to setup collaboration sessions who usually controls the participation and sharing credentials of all other members. So they are not able to share and control content in a democratic, equally empowering way, e.g. using multiple mouse pointers without having to go through additional authorization steps. They usually also cannot share and receive content in a device- and operating system-agnostic way which would make the content appear as if it would be natively provided on their local computing environment, recreating the same native interaction experience with remote content as with local content. E.g. these solutions cannot combine local and remote application windows, which could be shared from a set of diverse remote devices with different operating system and form factors, on a local computing device in a way that it makes them appear and react as if they were all hosted locally.
Traditional collaboration applications use popups with previews or selection windows with dropdowns to pick the window or object to be shared, creating an unnecessary hurdle for the user experience of highly interactive and collaborative teams.
Therefore, it is desirable to develop systems and methods which simplify the virtual interaction between remote users, which are available instantly and permanently and provide augmenting and complementing capabilities locally and remotely.